Grieving for a Love You Have Lost

Source: Curtis Brown, for Santa Fe Opera

Orfeo, by Claudio Monteverdi with libretto by Alessandro Striggio, was one of the earliest operas and largely centers around one character — Orfeo, or Orpheus in English, who has lost his beloved Euridice to a poisonous snake bite on their wedding day. Without hesitation, he decides to go down into Hades to retrieve her and bring her back to life. There is only one caveat: if he looks back on the return voyage to life, she will be plunged back into Hades forever.

In the brilliant, current Santa Fe Opera production, as in life, there is no ambiguity about the fact that losing a beloved is hell. Going through it is, indeed, an emotional descent into Hades. A survivor may well feel that they would do anything, brave anything, to get the person back. They may even risk their lives to do it. I remembered being both shocked and moved when I learned that when leprosy was an untreatable disease, and some partners of leprosy victims who were living in sanitoria willfully infected themselves and risked their lives so they could be with their beloveds. Love is probably the strongest positive emotion in life.

One of the main characters in the opera is Music, and she sings that she can move hearts to anger or joy. I have personally met many people in many countries who concur with that. They credit music and song lyrics with helping them through difficult periods in their life, and giving them mental peace. Several people even took piano lessons as adults, because actually making music was healing for them. When my beloved was in the hospital once, a sound healer arrived with a harp to play for him. During that same hospitalization, a woman arrived who offered to play the Native American drum. These were healing options that the hospital provided.

In Orfeo, the audience instinctively knows that when characters are blissfully happy and in love, it is inevitable that there will be a snake in the garden, some lurking danger or darkness, because if everyone is happy all the time it doesn’t make for compelling drama. It also bears no resemblance to the vicissitudes of life. Happiness is fickle. Joy can vanish so quickly.

When Euridice dies, Orfeo is so sad that the rivers and rocks and trees cry. In literature, art and film, this is called “pathetic fallacy,” although there is nothing pathetic about it. It refers to attributing human emotions to nature, animals, and objects. Recently, I was writing about a historic cemetery and I noted that yellow leaves on tree branches that hung over graves were weeping.

In the opera, Euridice is following Orfeo out of hell but he loses control of his emotions and looks back at the woman he loves. She vanishes forever. The warning is clear: controlling powerful emotions and keeping them in check is mandatory in life. Losing control leads to suffering.

Because Orfeo is a good person, and has brought much joy to everyone and everything around him, he is rewarded when his father Apollo carries him up to heaven. Is this a metaphor for finding happiness again after terrible darkness? Does Orfeo get relief from his grief through death? Or is it magical thinking that a deus ex machina will descend from heaven to save him? These are all possibilities.

In a less magnificent production, the opera could have been little more than a static performance with few main characters. But under the sure, inspired, guiding hand of director Yuval Sharon and visual environment designers Alex Schweder and Matthew Johnson the vision of love, hell and heaven is audacious and unforgettable. The gods cavort on a physical hill which opens up into the literal jaw of Hades when Orfeo makes his descent, and reappears after he returns without Euridice. In Hades, Orfeo physically floats in the misty, dark environment. At the end, the sun rises over all, and Orfeo is lifted up to heaven.

The evening was an example of how music and singing lifted up an entire audience which was gripped by the drama onstage. And another drama unfolded on opening night. The lead, Orfeo, injured his back during rehearsals and his understudy Luke Sutliff had to go on. I wonder what emotions the understudy felt. Would it be heaven or hell for him? Luckily for him and for the audience, it was the latter. As for Rolando Villazón, the lead, it might have been some version of (temporary) hell for him not to be able to perform on opening night.

Up. Down. Love. The grinding pain of loss. Happiness. The hell of misery. Elation. Depression. Hope. Hopelessness. Looking forward to the future. Being damned by looking back to the past. Trauma. Healing. Courage. Weakness. The vicissitude of life. That’s what Orfeo is all about and why the myth of Orpheus and Euridice continues to inspire and move audiences in every artistic genre.